June Jolly
Nurse who pushed for family involvement on children’s wards
JUNE JOLLY, who has died aged 87, was a nurse who helped to transform the emotional and social care of children in English hospitals, turning wards into playrooms and overturning hidebound practice that separated sick children from their parents.
In her book The Other Side of Paediatrics: a guide to the everyday care of sick
children (1980), she reshaped attitudes, encouraging “familycentred” nursing and the “human side” of paediatrics.
June Jolly was born on September 28 1928 at Hove, the eldest of four children of Arthur Jolly, a chartered accountant, and his wife Flora (née Leaver), a commissioner for the Girl Guides.
Aged 12 June and two siblings were evacuated to Windsor on the Canadian/ American border, where she was fostered with a local paediatrician. “I always used to go out with him on a Saturday when he did his rounds,” she remembered. “I always wanted to be a doctor, as a result.” The three Jolly children returned to Britain towards the end of the war.
June studied Social Studies at Southampton University and the London School of Economics (where she specialised in child care) in the late 1940s and subsequently spent 11 years as a children’s social worker in Kent. Then in 1963 she joined a new fast-track graduate nurse training programme at St Thomas’ Hospital.
The innovations in child care which she subsequently introduced were underpinned by deep Christian convictions and by the work of leading child development experts, including Donald Winnicott, who taught her in London, and James and Joyce Robertson, who encouraged her work. She drew on the Robertsons’ observations of the “protest, despair and detachment” of children in hospital.
As a nurse she soon saw the limitations of established medical practice and the untapped potential of good nursing care – indeed of skilled nurses to meet the emotional needs of sick children. Even though the Platt Report of 1959 had advised that parents should have greater access to wards and be allowed to help with the care of their child, institutional resistance and inertia meant that the pace of change was glacial.
In 1971 June Jolly was asked to set up a new paediatric unit at the Brook Hospital in Woolwich. She pulled out the dull, standard-issue curtains, replacing them with cheery fabrics bought with Green Shield stamps. Staff were given colourful aprons with generous pockets to accommodate toys.
Parents and nurses were encouraged to cuddle the children and a new care-by-parent unit was opened, allowing families to stay together, with emergency advice at the end of the telephone.
On Guy Fawkes night young patients were entertained with toffee apples and fireworks, and at Christmas, June Jolly arranged for a circus to bring a baby elephant and lion cub on to the ward, although in return she had to wear a clown’s outfit.
In 1974 she won a Nightingale and Rayne Foundation scholarship to travel to North America and Jamaica to study family involvement in paediatric health care. Inspired by their progressive practice, she went on to write The Other Side of Paediatrics.
Her other publications included Missed Beginnings: Death Before Life Has Been Established (1987). She also worked for the Department of Health and the Greenwich Health Authority, and served with distinction on various committees and working groups.
June Jolly never married. June Jolly, born September 28 1928, died March 12 2016